Ottoneu Auto Roster Set

Automates daily lineup management for an Ottoneu fantasy baseball team. Authenticates to FanGraphs via WordPress login, scrapes the current lineup page, then benches non-starters and fills empty slots with the best available confirmed starters. Handles both batters and pitchers. Intended to run several times per day as a scheduled task.

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• requests, beautifulsoup4, pandas, python-dotenv

python -m venv venv
venv\Scripts\activate        # Windows
# source venv/bin/activate   # Linux/Mac
pip install requests beautifulsoup4 pandas python-dotenv

Setup

python setup_config.py

Creates .env with your credentials and initializes hot_offenses.json and movement_log.txt. Never commit .env.

Configuration

All settings live in .env:

Variable	Required	Description
OTTONEU_USERNAME	Yes	FanGraphs login email
OTTONEU_PASSWORD	Yes	FanGraphs password
LEAGUE	Yes	Ottoneu league ID (from the URL)
TEAM_ID	No	Your team ID — required to view a future date's lineup
TARGET_DATE	No	Override today's date (YYYY-MM-DD) for debugging
HOT_OFFENSE_WEEKS	No	Lookback window for hot offense detection (default: 3)
CATCHER_SLOTS_TO_FILL	No	How many C slots to fill: 1 or 2 (default: 2)
PITCHER_OVERRIDE_STRICT	No	If true, strict mode evicts SP-override pitchers even when Starting=True (default: false)

Running

python auto-roster-set.py

Moves are logged to movement_log.txt. Run this several times per day — lineup confirmations trickle in throughout the morning.

Pitcher Role Overrides

Two-way players who have both SP and RP Ottoneu eligibility but are currently used in only one MLB role can be pinned in pitcher_role_overrides.txt:

# Format: Display Name = SP or RP
Cristopher Sanchez = RP
Paul Skenes = SP

Set PITCHER_OVERRIDE_STRICT=true in .env to also evict these players from the wrong slot even after lineup lock.

How It Works

Batter logic

1. Bench any active lineup player who has no game, is confirmed not starting, or is not yet confirmed (the script re-runs will catch them later once confirmed).
2. Fill empty slots using a scarcity heuristic: players eligible at fewer positions are placed first so that flexible players remain available for flex slots (MI, Util). Batting order and platoon advantage break ties.

Pitcher logic

1. Bench SPs not confirmed as today's starter.
2. Bench RPs who are confirmed starters with SP eligibility (they belong in an SP slot), are fatigued (pitched on each of the last two days), or have no game.
3. Fill SP slots with confirmed starters — skipping pitchers facing a hot offense (positive team Offense value over the last HOT_OFFENSE_WEEKS weeks per FanGraphs).
4. Fill RP slots with relievers not facing fatigue; Following status takes priority over P/IP.

Caching

hot_offenses.json and games_played.json cache daily data so repeated runs don't re-fetch from FanGraphs. Both files are only written on a successful fetch — a network failure won't poison the cache and block future retries.

Deployment on Synology NAS

The production environment is a Synology NAS running the script on a schedule via DSM Task Scheduler (User-Defined Script):

cd /volume1/Assorted/multimedia/scripts/Ottoneu
git pull origin main >> run_log.txt
/volume1/Assorted/multimedia/scripts/Ottoneu/synology_env/bin/python auto-roster-set.py >> run_log.txt 2>&1

To push local changes to the NAS, run push-to-nas.bat (Windows only, path is gitignored). It uses robocopy with /XO so newer files on the NAS (logs, JSON caches) are never overwritten by older local copies.

Files

File	Description
auto-roster-set.py	Main script
return_hot_offenses.py	Fetches team Offense rankings from FanGraphs API; caches to hot_offenses.json
return_games_played.py	Scrapes the Ottoneu games-played tracker; caches to games_played.json
setup_config.py	Interactive setup — creates .env and initializes data files
pitcher_role_overrides.txt	Manual SP/RP role pins for two-way eligible pitchers
hot_offenses.json	Daily cache of hot offense teams (one entry per date)
games_played.json	Daily cache of projected games-played counts per position
movement_log.txt	Append-only log of every lineup move with timestamp